The good folks at 37signals, whose Signal vs. Noise blog is one of the best blogs focused on design and user experience (two of my areas of personal passion) have posted the table of contents from their forthcoming book, Getting Real.
Getting Real is the moniker for the company's vision about a smaller, faster, better way to build web-based applications that starts with getting the interface right before you get the software wrong.
The book expands these concepts to cover the broader entrepreneurial sandbox, including areas like ideation, prioritization, feature selection, promotion, process and pricing.
What follows is an excerpt, but to be blunt, would be entrepreneurs can get 80% of the value of the book RIGHT NOW just by reading the table of contents, since the concepts, while intuitive are non-obvious and hold together well when presented holistically in a table of contents type of view:
Design
- Interface First: Design the UI before you start programming
- Epicenter Design: Start at the “epicenter” of the page and then build outward
- The Blank Slate: Set expectations with a thoughtful first-run experience
- Three State Solution: Design for regular, blank, and error states
- Copywriting is Interface Design: Words are a crucial component of your UI
- Don’t Go Greek: Use real text instead of lorem ipsum
- One Interface: Incorporate admin functions into the regular UI
